Best Last-Minute Theater Tickets

Critics' Picks

You don’t have to be a student and you needn’t pay handling fees to get cheap rush tickets for Chicago Opera Theater’s innovative, consistently high-quality productions at the Harris Theater. Just show up at the box office at the right time—5-6 PM the same day for evening shows, noon-1 PM for matinees—and, depending on availability, which is almost always good, you’ll be able to pick up a ticket at half price. (Students, however, can get an even better deal by signing up for online alerts.) COT’s three-production season runs from April into May; the lineup for 2011 includes Death and the Powers, composed by Tod Machover from a libretto by poet Robert Pinsky, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s 1693 Medea, and He/She, a pairing of love-is-hell song cycles by Robert Schumann and Leos Janacek.

The rest of the year the rush policy
is set by whatever company is resident, but the Harris offers the sweetest deal
of all for shows it produces itself:
between 6 PM and 7 PM on the day of
the show, available tickets are sold for $10, cash.